Break and Enter (44 page)

“Yes?” Peter responded after a moment, wondering if Geller had been told to stonewall all questions. “What else?”

“I think she did some, you know, accounting, where they took the political donations and counted them and put them in the safe.”

“She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

No answer.

“She popular with the men? You had a woman running around the office, a strong-minded, good-looking woman.”

“I didn’t care for her, if that’s what you’re askin’.”

“Okay.” He had to bring Geller to life, get him talking. “Tell me about when this was, what was happening.”

“This was a couple of years ago when he was gettin’ ready for the election. Gettin’ everybody together, you know.”

“Okay. What else? What else was going on?”

Geller stared. “Not too much, far as I remember.”

The man was not hostile or even actively concealing information. Peter’s questions simply hadn’t activated Geller’s personality. There had to be a way in, as Mastrude said, to expose the man’s beliefs.

“Are you religious, Mr. Geller?”

“I been thinkin’ about God a long time, Mr. Scattergood.”

“You believe that there is a right and a wrong?”

“Yes, I most certainly do.” Geller’s voice was more animated.

“Would you say that you have moral beliefs?”

“Yes,” Geller responded, his eyes now coming back to his face. A murderer, Peter reflected, might need to believe in redemption. “If I know somethin’ is right, then I will do it. We are all in great trouble, you know what I’m sayin’, and we must do the right thing.”

“You’ve worked for the Mayor a long time. You must believe in him, in his methods.”

“For a long time.” Geller closed his hands before him. “The Mayor is a very great man. The Mayor is a man who believes. He is a man who will help the people of this city, Mr. Scattergood. He believes we can have a great city, a city where people are good.”

“What have you been doing for him all this time?”

“Anything the man thinks is important, anything he asks—drivin’, runnin’ little jobs, anything.”

“Why so loyal?”

“That man has a vision, he has an understanding, you got that? Back when he was a councilman he had it and some of us saw it and we wanted to work with the man.”

“You grow up in the city?”

“Yeah, North Philly, here and there.”

“Good childhood?”

Geller stared at him, and the coldness passed again into his face.

“You’d rather not say?” Peter jabbed.

Geller’s lower lip tightened and pulled back from his teeth. The anger, thus, was very near, always.

“Why didn’t you like Johnetta Henry?” Peter said.

“ ‘Cause I didn’t think she was good for what we was tryin’ to do. She was a bad girl, just tryin’ to get some attention,” Geller blurted. “Here you got people who work twenty years to get where they’re goin’.”

“Was she still seeing Carothers when she was involved in the campaign?” Peter asked.

“Yes. And after she moved in with Darryl they was goin’ around Darryl’s back,” Geller said in a rigid voice, his eyes watering ever so slightly in concentration. The man was serious as death. “She was that kind of woman, always behind somebody’s back—she knew we knew and she didn’t care. That Carothers boy used to come over there while Darryl was away.”

This seemed unlikely to Peter, but he couldn’t be sure. After all, Carothers had possessed the key to the apartment. “What did they do?”

“What you expect?” Geller said.

“Why didn’t anybody tell Darryl she was cheating on him?”

“He wouldn’t’ve believed it.” Geller looked at Peter. “That boy trusted everybody.”

“You know him well?”

“Of course I did!”

“Didn’t the family care that their favorite son was in this situation? Didn’t the Mayor want her to marry into the family?”

Geller seemed to have some trouble coming up with an answer. If the family didn’t care for Johnetta, as Peter had been told, then that created a motive to scare or hurt her and get her out of Darryl’s life.

“You just told me that nobody would tell Darryl that Johnetta was cheating on him. Why would you know it and not him?”

“ ‘Cause I’m tied in there, I know everybody.”

“Did you care for Darryl?”

“I watched him grow, I saw what he was goin’ to be.” Geller’s hands opened now and grasped in frustration at the air before him. “I saw the wonder of that young man, and what he meant to the Mayor and his family—”

“You’re bitter?”

“Very bitter, Mr. Scattergood.”

“You blame it on Johnetta?” Peter shot across his desk.

Geller glared at him and Peter peered back, seeing that of course Geller blamed Johnetta, for without her there was no Carothers, the murderer of Darryl Whitlock. Geller must have seen with those same yellowed, watering eyes that he, too, and more directly, had caused Whitlock’s death.

The phone rang. Peter picked it up, expecting Berger. “Excuse me just a moment,” he said.

“This is Gerald Turner,” a harsh voice ran at him breathlessly. “Let me talk to Geller, now.”

“Who?”

“I understand that Mr. Charles Geller, one of our staff members, is over there, Mr. Scattergood.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Peter said, nodding at Geller that the call would be brief.

“He received a telephone call from your office not an hour ago. Don’t bullshit me.”

“Look,” Peter responded icily, “if your information is so good, you would know that I have just come from my attorney’s office, where I have been negotiating the sad end of my marriage. Get out your Yellow
Pages and look under lawyers and you’ll find one named Mastrude, specializing in divorces.
That
is what is on my mind, Mr.—” He almost said Turner’s name, which Geller undoubtedly knew. “Completely on my mind, not your own office difficulties. This is a big staff and I don’t know exactly what everybody is up to, but I’ll be happy to ask around when I get the chance.”

“Then tell your staff Geller is to call me as soon as he comes in,” Turner demanded. “Got that?”

“Fine,” Peter said.

“You and I need to understand some things,” Turner said in the same panicked voice. “The Mayor has decided that he is to be apprised of all developments in this case as soon as they occur. Do you understand? You are to report to me on a daily basis.”

“That is a remarkably unlikely arrangement. You have no jurisdiction in this case—”

“I do not understand your
tone,
Mr. Scattergood. We all desire the same outcome to these events, I trust.”

“I trust. I remind you that you have no ability to dictate—”

“Listen to me,” Turner growled. “Bill Hoskins will get it straight through your head if I can’t. Every witness, every lead, every bit of evidence. I want the whole file on my desk tomorrow morning.”

Turner hung up. Now Peter knew Turner had lost track of his unpredictable, true-believing executioner; Geller was operating on his own.

“You tell the Mayor you were here?” Peter asked.

“He trusts me,” Geller stated solemnly, raising his eyebrows.

“Okay,” Peter responded casually, “you were telling me about Johnetta Henry. Was she dating Carothers or Whitlock back before her son was born?”

“Well,” Geller said, “not Darryl yet, but she was spendin’ time with a few different men back then.”

“She got pregnant sometime back then, right?”

“Yes, she did,” Geller stated.

“What was it about her?”

The sad man nodded knowingly. “She had this way of playin’ with you, tryin’ to make you pay attention. But to my mind it just wasn’t
right, it wasn’t right that she was messin’ up what so many people had tried to do.”

“Who was she seeing?”

“Oh, well, it was a busy office, phone callin’ and so on, and she was messin’ around with Carothers and maybe some other people, you know. Far as I can actually remember, Darryl didn’t come into the picture until later. She got pregnant from Wayman Carothers and it was later she moved in with Darryl.”

But Carothers, Peter knew, was not the father of Tyler. He didn’t know how to respond; he’d use one of Janice’s counseling tricks, the nondirective response that repeated information.

“Other men?”

“Sure, you know.”

“Men in the Mayor’s group, the campaign people?”

“That girl, well, lotta them wanted her—”

“But who got her? The Mayor?”

Geller stared at Peter, then looked away, caught. “Everybody knew she started seein’ Darryl after she had that baby. It used to make me mad, you know? How everybody had worked so hard. You’re askin’ me, mister, if she fucked the Mayor. Now, I find that to be an insult. That’s an insult to a man I care about and know deeply. The Mayor and I go back a long way, so I’m not sayin’ what you want me to say, you understand? All I’m sayin’ is she and the Mayor, they was friendly and that she liked to laugh. Far as I’m concerned, she was just a distraction to the man. She might have wanted the man’s attention. I’m willin’ to say that. But after a couple of months it was pretty clear that gal was goin’ to have a baby, you know, and everybody heard how Carothers was the father but she didn’t want to see him no more maybe, and then there was no more jokin’ and huggin’ with nobody once she was pregnant—you see, Mr. Scattergood, what you don’t understand is that the Mayor is a man who
respects
the sanctity of life—and then one day after the baby come she walk into the office with Darryl and tell everybody she and Darryl were thinkin’ about gettin’ married, and then she got another job and never come into the office no more. After that nobody talk about Johnetta, and then after about a year everybody forgot about what she was doin’ and nobody knew where she went. And then she was livin’ with Darryl
and nobody see her with her baby. Everybody be askin’ about where she put her baby, and of course her grandma had keeped it the whole time. So that’s all I can say, you know what I’m sayin’?”

It sounded like Johnetta had gotten pregnant by the Mayor and then sought the relationship with Darryl for protection from the Mayor’s disapproval. By fooling Carothers into presenting himself as the father of Tyler, she let the Mayor off the hook. Geller didn’t seem to know that the Mayor might be the father of Tyler. His devotion to the Mayor seemed to depend on such a blindness. Who knew what twisted rationale Geller had contrived for himself? The question was whether or not Geller had been working independently the night of the murder or whether he had been ordered by the Mayor to do something—maybe only to scare Johnetta Henry or maybe even to kill her. Upon reflection, Peter decided it was unlikely that the Mayor had asked Geller to kill Johnetta. By all accounts the Mayor was a decent man—though devious and power-hungry like any politician—and his message of compassion and city unity seemed too genuine to come from a man who could order a murder. What was certain was the fact that while alive, Johnetta Henry could destroy the Mayor in several ways, claiming perhaps truthfully that he was the father of her baby, or that his election was funded illegally. Perhaps he only expressed frustration with her, and Geller had heard. What was even more certain was that, even if he hadn’t ordered the murder, the Mayor had panicked and tried to cover it up.

“How come you’ve told me all this?” Peter asked.

Geller stared back at him and in this moment Peter saw that the man who had suffered innumerable beatings had no fear of arrest.

“Because I feel this great righteousness of what we are tryin’ to do. The Mayor is a very, very great man. He would not mind me tellin’ you these things, Mr. Scattergood. His mind is above these little questions that you and I are talkin’ about. He has a terrible sadness about losin’ Darryl. And anything I can do to help the man get past that is some-thin’ I’m goin’ to do. I don’t need to be asked to help the man. I don’t need people pointin’ out to me, ‘Oh, this would be a nice thing to do for the Mayor.’ He knows that his way is right and that I am only followin’ him. We have our way. This is our way. We are goin’ to overcome.”

“I see,” Peter responded in a respectful, considering voice—the same anesthetizing tone he used when listening patiently to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons who came to the door in conservative coat and tie and politely tried to engage him in discussions of doctrine. He knew that he was nearly out of time, that he had to get Geller out of the building.

“Who killed Johnetta Henry?” Peter asked.

Geller’s hands closed.

“Somebody who decided that it was the right thing to do.”

Neither man spoke. Perhaps, Peter wondered, Geller had mumbled his pathological dogma even as he threatened Johnetta Henry, hurling his judgment of her danger to the Mayor at her, backing her into the bathroom, and, with the means of his thick, well-preserved body, bludgeoning and choking her until she conformed to his truth. Geller, Peter concluded, was deeply sick, the kind of a man who found a way to express his rage within a morality scheme, a man who justified murder with the highest of ideals. Most men who killed did so out of bravado, anger, jealousy, greed, and panic—the most petty, human motivations. There were the few men who planned murders with the exactitude of a gem cutter and the few whose understanding of reality had been destroyed—Robinson fit into that last description. And then—moving toward the most ominous and cruel—there were the men whose sexual happiness demanded a corpse. And last, perhaps, there were the men who, save for a fractured moral cosmology, seemed to have no reason to kill, whose interior lives had compressed the memory of ancient abuses into a dense stone of hatred. It was in this small unknowable space that these men existed much of the time, even while performing their day-to-day functions with plodding ability; these were the unredeemable wretches who decorated their prison cells with bizarre slogans and practiced private and unknowable rituals. In order to survive, they followed those who provided acceptance and interpreted society for them. They knew themselves to be not quite of this world, their rage to be a quiet, flat thing that only found its penultimate expression rarely, and that normal people did not have much use for such men as them, that the world condemned their behavior and had only suspicious compassion for them. These were the men who leave a cold hand over the heart and
these were the men who see death—someone’s, maybe their own—as a possibility of each moment.